The nub of it

Time's Joe Klein: "It isn't hard to locate the immediate cause of the shutdown and impending debt-ceiling debacle: the radical nihilist minority of the Republican Party and the GOP's craven leadership. Words should not be minced here. These radicals--it is wildly inaccurate to call them conservatives--are a pestilence feeding on ignorance and cynicism, preying on fear as a period of unprecedented prosperity wanes. They are not the apocalypse but represent the desperate last gasp of the white majority and of an era. My generation's era." Alas, no truer words have e'er been said.